The View From Planet Kerth: Now is not the time — again, and again, and again…

When the phone rang at dinnertime that Thursday evening, I watched my wife’s face pale as she listened to the voice at the other end. It was her doctor calling to say that her symptoms were caused by an aggressive, well-advanced uterine cancer.

“What can we do about it?” my wife said, her voice barely above a shaky whisper.

“Oh, now is not the time to do anything about it,” her doctor said. “Now is the time for prayer.”

No…wait…that’s not what happened.

My wife’s doctor told her that the wheels were already in motion toward fixing the problem. Appointments were being made at that moment.

And by dinnertime the next day, we were at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, meeting with teams of doctors readying to fix the problem once and for all.

And fix it they did. She has been cancer-free for almost a decade now.

We’ve all heard a lot of “Now is not the time” lately about a different kind of cancer in our culture, ever since the deadly rampage in Las Vegas that killed or injured more than 500 innocent concert-goers, slaughtered by a man wielding weapons that were completely legal by current laws. Though our laws prohibit owning a fully automatic weapon, there is no law restricting the cheap modification of certain weapons to make them as deadly as a military-style automatic weapon. No law restricts how many of such modified weapons any individual can own. Or where he can buy them without a background check. Or how many rounds of ammunition he can possess. Or how big a clip-capacity. Or….

Well, I could go on. But apparently now is not the time.

The week before the Las Vegas carnage might have been a good time to talk about these things, but many of us were still praying for the Florida victims of Orange County, or Fort Lauderdale, or Orlando, all murdered by high-powered weapons within the last year or so. It just wasn’t the time.

Just before those events, it might have been the time to talk about it, but we were still praying for those lost in San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, or Roseburg, Oregon, all slain in the previous year.

And before that it was Charleston, and Washington, D.C., and Sandy Hook….

In the brief moments that we take a break from our prayers and yield to those who insist that the time has come to have “the talk,” we begin with talking points, like: “Well, what about Chicago — murder city, with the toughest gun laws in the world?”

Except that it’s a lie.

For one thing, Chicago’s per capita murder rate — though horrific at 27.9 per 100,000 — is less than half the murder rate in St. Louis (59.3). It ranks well below the murder rate of Baltimore (51.2), Detroit (45.2), New Orleans (44.5), Cleveland (34.7), Newark (33.4) and Memphis (32.5), all cities with much looser gun laws.

And those “toughest gun laws” in the nation?

While it is true that gun shops are still banned within Chicago city limits, Chicago is literally walking distance from Mike Pence’s Indiana, a state with some of the weakest gun laws in the nation. It is only a half-hour drive from gun-happy Wisconsin. In fact, police records show that 60 percent of all Chicago weapons seized in the commission of a crime came from Indiana, Wisconsin or Mississippi — all states where almost anybody can get a gun of almost any type, with almost no questions asked.

Many of the rest of those crime-scene guns came from Chicago suburbs with looser laws — suburbs like Marengo, where in June a handful of thieves broke into a gun shop and stole “an unknown number” of weapons, of “unknown” types, according to the owner.

Meanwhile in New York City, with much stiffer gun laws than Chicago’s, murder rates have plummeted to historic lows. The same is true in Los Angeles.

One feature of New York’s successful battle against unrestricted flow of guns is its commitment to sue online sellers of guns — many of which originate in Florida. Although New York has lost many of those battles in court, their commitment to filing such suits has convinced many online gun sellers to steer clear of New York just to avoid the hassle, and to focus their sales to softer markets who embrace the “freedom” of armory-scale ownership. As a result, New York City doesn’t even make the top-20 when it comes to homicide, falling well behind Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and Milwaukee, who are all on the top-20 list just behind Chicago.

But now is not the time to talk about all this, is it? Now is the time for prayer. We should wait until just before (massacre to be named later).

Many conservative politicians — even ones who begin to wonder how much we are willing to pay for an individual’s “freedom” to become a killing machine — think the support of any gun-control measures would be political suicide. Their base would never tolerate it.

But again, that’s a talking-point lie.

Consider the situation in Australia, where 35 innocents were murdered in 1996 by a maniac with semi-automatic weapons. Horrified to the point of common sense, prime minister John Howard and deputy prime minister Tim Fischer — conservatives both — announced their commitment to a total ban of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Those laws passed.

The result? Australian citizens voluntarily handed in 660,959 weapons, which were destroyed. Australia has not had a single mass-murder in the two decades since.

And the political result? Both politicians were re-elected. Fischer, whose conservative National Party constituency owned more guns than any other group in Australia, went on to serve four more terms. Other office-servers in his party maintained their usual levels of support.

In retrospect, Howard ranks his decision to control guns as one of his finest moments. And Fischer agrees, adding that he now urges Australians to avoid traveling to America because of our gun violence.

American lawmakers need to show the same courage as Fischer and Howard—whenever they think “now is the time” to get up off their knees, get up off their asses and realize that “satisfying their base” doesn’t mean that they have to play only to their basest instincts.

And if our politicians fail to show that level of courage, then it’s our responsibility to cure this cancer when the time is right.

Like, maybe, election day.

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The author splits his time between Southwest Florida and Chicago. Not every day, though. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Why wait a whole week for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Get T.R.'s book, 'Revenge of the Sardines,' available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine online book distributors. His column appears every Saturday.